…God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. [Romans 5.5.]

“With a perversity as pathetic as it is impoverishing, we have become preoccupied today with the extraordinary, sporadic, non-universal ministries of the Spirit to the neglect of the ordinary, general ones.”

Just been reading Packer’s thoughts on The Love of God – it is the Spirit’s ordinary work to give peace, joy, hope, and love, through the ‘shedding abroad in our hearts of knowledge of the love of God’. It is Paul’s prayer of Ephesians 3.14, it is John’s statement of 1 John 4.7.

His love finds expression in everything he says and does, and we have assurance of this in the cross of Christ (Gal 2.20), so we can trust the promise of Romans 8.28 – everything that happens to us expresses God’s love to us! That is it tells us that God is love; all that happens can be used as evidence that God is love, and love is how God defines it.

I grumble and moan at my circumstances, I become distrustful, I grow half-hearted in service of Him, I split my loyalties until their no longer loyalties. God’s love is ultimate. And since God loved me I ought to love others.